Migrating from Mezzanine to Wagtail

A few years ago a group of friends (me included) started building a website to make Portugal’s startups known. That website is Novaweb. When I started developing it I looked through Django’s CMS options. At the time I found Django CMS and Mezzanine. This was 6 years ago so I don’t really remember why I chose Mezzanine.

At the time it seemed like a great choice. So right now Novaweb is running Django 1.5.6 (still with South migrations), Mezzanine 1.4.3 and many other outdated packages.

Because the website hasn’t gotten any activity lately I just left it there. But now it’s time to update everything. So I looked through Mezzanine to see what was needed to make this update.

The first thing that jumped out to me is that Mez’s latest version (4.2.3 at the time of writing) only supports Django 1.10. I also found some minor problems when using Python 3 (I wouldn’t start any project right now with Python 2). So with all these problems, I can’t use Mezzanine, no matter how much I like it.

I looked through the options and Django CMS and Wagtail seem the most promising. In the end I chose Wagtail without looking much at any of the other options features because Wagtail supports both Python 3 and Django 2.0. So the choice is obvious.

I’m still getting the hang of how things are organized but so far I’m really liking Wagtail. It’s a barebones approach to a CMS and, honestly, that’s perfect for me. Even with Mezzanine I have loads of custom views that do not use Mez’s framework because some pages had so much custom code that it just wasn’t worth it.

Wagtail’s barebones approach seems like the way to go. I’ll report back After I finish the full migration.